Weekly Election Update: Godfather Edition

Israeli polls are becoming broken records as they crown Yesh Atid. In a new Geocartography poll, YA received 27 seats to Likud’s 22. Other than that, the poll looked familiar save for a four seat jump by United Torah Judaism to 10 seats. Here come the chussidim (or perhaps the oversampling)! Significantly, 47% of Likud voters said that they were certainly voting Likud, while only 33.5% of Yesh Atid voters said that they were certain.

It is unclear who is being made to look worse in the Netanyahu-Yediot Achronot scandal. I’m going to list some things that have been reported. I only made one of them up

Netanyahu threatened that he would “take care” of the paper if Yediot Achronot crushed him during the last election

Nuni Moses (who runs the paper) offered Netanyahu favorable coverage in exchange for passing laws to force Yisrael HaYom to be sold rather than being given away for free

Nuni Moses said that he had to attack Netanyahu because Bibi was threatening the family business through his support of Yisrael HaYom

Moses told Netanyahu that if Yisrael HaYom stops being free then “Netanyahu’s enemies would become his enemies”

Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon made a number of quips about the scandal and said that journalists must be separated from government. He may want to start with the Knesset. I give credit to him for not having any former journalists within his party’s Knesset delegation, but the Knesset is made up of over 10% journalists (with seven, SEVEN!, coming from the Zionist Union). For context, in the 111th congress, consisting of 541 people, there were six members who previously worked in the media.

A coalition kerfuffle broke out due to leaked audio of Likud MK Mickey Zohar fighting with Coalition Chairman MK David Bitan in order to receive more budget money for personal policy goals in exchange for Zohar’s support for the budget. It was an ugly recording and made the coalition look bad and you know what that means…MK Oren Hazan! Zohar accused Hazan of recording the discussion and leaking it to the media. Hazan replied with a tweet that denied nothing and used the term “slimy porridge” which is also the name of Hazan’s planned autobiography.

When Kalpi was founded, it had only one mission, to encourage the elimination of teenagers riding electric bikes. We would accept either the elimination of the bikes or the teenagers. Thanks to the brave MKs of United Torah Judaism, some progress has been made on this front. The video attached to that link, is the Kalpi, “no really watch this video”, video of the week.

Totally precise and not arbitrary election date: February 6, 2018

Winner: Yesh Atid. The certainty numbers are troubling for YA. A number of people who are voting Yesh Atid now are going to return to the Zionist Union. Furthermore, Likud will improve when the investigations end. That said, poll after poll is showing that Yesh Atid has a strong message. Now they just need a base.

Runner Up: Likud

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